Yearbook of Science and the Future 1993 [antikvár]

A few years ago, while driving through a fierce snowstorm toward Raton, New Mexico, I caught sight of a turnoff marked "Folsom—8 miles." The implications took me by surprise. Why, just a few minutes away was---- Yielding to a sudden urge, I slithered onto the icy side road and soon reached a few abandoned stores, some weather-beaten firame houses, an old hotel, and a tmy grocery store with a post office and gas pump. Ahead, through the blowing snow, loomed a frame building with a battered sign hanging by a single nail: "Museum." In a large, dim, unhealed room I saw dusty relics ranging in age from the pioneer farmers to World War II—tools, broken toys, military uniforms, old machine guns, photos. Open on a counter, next to an empty pickle Jar labeled "Donations," lay a guest register with curling pages, its last entry more than a year old. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the poor light. In a far corner the skull of an extinct bison hung on the wall. Next to it stood a small, hand-lettered display of badly faded photos of the momentous excavation that had been carried out nearby in the 1920s. Shivering in the cold, reading the labels, and listening to a distant window shutter banging in the wind, I was overcome by wonder. I was really here! Folsom—called by many the most important breakthrough in the archaeology of North America. And perhaps it was. For it was here that a black cowboy named George Mcjunkln found what was to become the first Indisputable evidence of the earliest Americans, hunters who had roamed the vast grasslands of North America when mammoths, mastodons, and now-extinct forms of giant bison were common. But, despite its revelations, Folsom begged the question: Were they really the earliest Americans? Searching for the answer has fueled a controversy that continues unabated today. VAUGHN M. BRYANT, JR., is Professor and Department Head, Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station. (Overleaf) Illustration by Ron Vlllanl From Columbus through Darwin . . . When Columbus opened the New World to exploration by Europeans, archaeology was more speculation and myth than science. Columbus called the natives "Indios" because he believed that San Salvador in The Bahamas was an island off the coast of Asia, then collectively known as the Indies. During the next three centuries Europeans subjugated all of the Americas. Cannons and guns proved better than stone knives, arrows, and spears, while strange European diseases spread quickly and killed millions. This ease of conquest convinced Europeans that the Indians were inferior, simplistic, and unintelligent—even though reports of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca civilizations suggested otherwise. Although some curiosity was expressed about the origins of these people, most Europeans accepted the explanations of Pope Alexander VI and other clergymen of the early 1500s that the Indians were descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel exiled from Assyria during the 1st millennium BC. Alternate theories proposed that their ancestors had come from the fabled lost continent of Atiantis or had been survivors of the biblical flood. In the late 1500s the Jesuit priest José de Acosta proposed that the New Worid's native peoples were descended from small groups of Asians 10